Orbis

The second series of Big Finish Audio Productions’ Eighth Doctor Adventures ended with a bang and left off on a double cliffhanger: both Lucie and the Doctor seem to be dead.  In Orbis, Series 3 picks up where it left off: Lucie is “unshot” by the Head Hunter who’d shot her in the cliffhanger, though still under threat of death, because she was shot with a “time bullet” which can be sped up, slowed, down, or reversed, at the shooter’s pleasure.  A very strange form of hostage insurance, indeed, and something that even the Doctor scoffs at later on.

While Lucie Miller had spent six months rebuilding her life at home believing the Doctor to be dead, it turns out that the Doctor had been teleported by the Sisterhood of Karn to a distant planet called Orbis, where he lives for roughly 600 years.  His memory is addled from his “fall” into the ocean and his several centuries of being the only biped on the planet.  He has made himself quite at home with the Keltans, a jellyfish race that thoroughly creeps out Lucie, even worse than the previous stories’ centipede-like Krell.  The Keltans are being threatened by the Molluscari, an oyster-like race.  The Doctor had previously got the Galactic Council to protect the Keltans, but recent climate change on Orbis brought longer storm seasons and rising ocean levels such that the Keltans are in danger of going extinct, and therefore not deemed a viable form of life for the planet, opening the way for the Molluscari to lay claim to the planet for colonisation.

The Head Hunter brings Lucie to the planet Orbis in the Doctor’s TARDIS.  Even in my re-listen I fell for her wacky story about the TARDIS being injured and leaking “time waste” that threatens the fabric of the universe.  In actuality, she is working for two parties: one unknown, and the other the Molluscari.  For the former, she’s collecting Morbius’ control device for the Stellar Manipulator that sank to the bottom of the ocean when the Doctor arrived.  For the latter, she’s collecting the Doctor so he will stop defending the Keltans.  With Lucie as her hostage, it seems like an easy plan.

But the Doctor’s memory is addled, he doesn’t remember Lucie, or even Earth.  It takes the course of the story for his memories to resurface, aided by a few comic slaps in the face from Lucie because her fingernails are charged with chronons from the TARDIS, apparently.

All in all, it’s one of the more imaginative stories in terms of alien creatures and invasive situations.  It inherits some of the Time Lord technological backstory from the end of the previous season, but tidies up those loose ends neatly.  The Head Hunter’s reappearance is handled really well, and her banter with Lucie is very similar to what we later see between Missy and Clara on TV in The Witch’s Familiar.

The Doctor, having his memory temporarily addled and restored by the end of this story, has a renewed sense of alienness to him.  His memories are back, but his perspective is no longer quite so human-centered as it has been for a while in this incarnation.  This sets up series 3 with a new dimension to his relationship with Lucie; he’s less of a pal and more of an alien.  He’s more prone to highlight the things in the universe that are different and foreign to humanity.  This may be a slight move from their friendly banter of series 2 toward their conflicting perspectives in series 1.  If you listen through series 3, you may see several examples of this.  But I’m only going to be covering one more story from this series in my re-listening run.